Tag: black consciousness

On this 22nd anniversary of the installation of a “new democratic South Africa”, BLF re-issues it’s “Revolutionary Call” and invites all BLACK PEOPLE who want freedom to its launch conference on 14 May 2016, in Soweto.

The counter revolutionary forces of white monopoly capital led by Johann Rupert and supported by opposition parties and the white media have called for a regime change. In this time, the heightened desperation and revolutionary anger of blacks are being channeled for neo liberal ends via organized white power. Now more than ever , the forces of revolution need to organize every segment of black life to resist and deal with this anti black offensive. The following extract from BLF’s press statement titled “Political Questions Facing The Country” delivered in Yeoville on 2 April 2016, is instructive:

“The call by Johann Rupert for a coup follows the failed attempt by his agents within the ANC, NEC to remove Zuma as expected by their handlers. Johann Rupert lost it and showed his hand. Now Malema has also endorsed the programme of regime change by Rupert and Co.

Johan Rupert and imperialism wants to remove Zuma before the people remove him through a revolutionary process that would ensure the end of white supremacy.

The call for Zuma to go is a calculation to make a pre-emptive strike to ensure a new stooge is put in power to ensure white interests are perpetuated. The favourite candidate right now is Cyril Ramaphosa who has already demonstrated that he can serve the interests of white capital even violently. Ramaphosa is not shy to kill for white capital – the Marikana massacre bears testimony to this.

The call for Zuma to go is because he no longer listens to white capital, he is looking “East for A family feast”- Russia, India and China. The close relationship with the Guptas is seen by white as a sign of how things are going to be if he is not quickly removed.

If Zuma is not removed he may introduce a bad culture of not taking the calls from London. The Guptas have upset white capital by entering into the mining sector aggressively. We saw how they bought Swiss owned Optimum coal. This deal is badly reported on and Brian Molefe is not given the credit he deserves as a patriot trying to safeguard national assets within a system that doesn’t permit this. No one knows that Optimum as owned by the Swiss actually tried to bully Eskom to break a deal it already has to try and pocket more money under threats of precipitating “loadsheding”.

The Guptas Must Go campaign is a campaign of white capital in its new attempt to reclaim their hold on the South African economy.

We wish to warn our people to be careful and not follow the agendas of white people under the pretext of fighting corruption.

We call on our people to reject the counter revolutionary call by the Rupert and Malema alliance. It is not about fighting corruption, it is about fighting for Rupert and white capital.

It’s a diversion from the fact that we want our land back!

We want Rupert and other land thieves to know that we are coming to take back the land. As we speak BLF members are organising around Stellenbosch.”

In this context BLF calls on blacks to join, build and support this beautiful revolutionary movement so as to end capitalist imperialism, white supremacy and all the other ills that manifest as the black condition and to install a black socialist system of governance.

We promise the politicians nothing! We demand that they deliver everything! All the political parties have now published their manifestoes; the empty ritual they buy our votes with. We say 17 years of elections without change are enough. Now we make our own manifesto:

We, the people of South Africa, hereby legislate a new law, titled “POLITICIANS AND PUBLIC SERVANTS: USE PUBLIC SERVICES”. This law compels all politicians, from the president to the local councilor, and all public servants, from the Director General to the sweeper and their families to use public utilities: Starting with the following:

Hospitals.

Schools.

Transport.

Housing! (The same standard house given to citizens must be used by all politicians and public servants)

A living wage for all!

Land belong to the people

Our politicians and public servants have neglected public services for far too long because they know they can take their families to the private sector. We say, what’s good for you is good for us. Equality for all, for real!

Our hospitals are falling apart; doctors and nurses are overworked and underpaid. By and large our public hospitals are places of death. Simply put, no one is safe in our public hospitals. Our leaders, politicians, senior public servants and their families use private hospitals and that is why they don’t care about public hospitals which are used by the poor.

Our public schools are in bad condition, teachers are underpaid and the government is not investing in their training with the result that after 12 years of schooling most children from public schools can’t read, write or count. This leads to a high unemployment rate amongst the youth who are trapped in hopelessness. Politicians and senior civil servants take their children to private schools. This explains why public schools are not a priority for them.

Our public transport system is appalling. Every morning and night our people are packed into taxis, buses and trains like sardines. The queues are long and the fares are high. Our leaders, the rich and senior civil servants have big subsidies to get private transport. Some of our ministers can buy cars worth millions with tax payers’ money.

The townships are generally badly serviced. The houses are small and millions are forced to live in shacks. The RDP houses built by our black government are worse than the matchbox houses built during apartheid. Our leaders live in mansions, while the people are forced to live in rat-infested townships.

A living wage, the ANC and DA parties have legislated starvation minimum wages for our people. Farm workers earn a shocking R105 a day. Our government kills workers when they demand a living wage as in Marikana but cabinet ministers and members of parliament give themselves millions in salaries.

Land For 20 years of the ANC has delivered only 8% of land to black. It would take 100s of years to buy back our land. Why are we buying our land back? We demand that all the land be nationalised without compensation and be equitably redistributed amongst the people.

We hereby commit ourselves to struggle to realize this legislation to hold public representatives and servants accountable to the people!

Together let’s make this law a reality.

This campaign is undertaken in the memory of Andries Tatane who was killed by our government for demanding quality services for all!

The Marikana massacre brutally thrust blacks into naked enemy fire at the ANC barricades. Objectively, this moment in history marked the spiritual death of black faith in the ANC and the birth of a revolutionary consciousness seeking a revolutionary home. That home has not been found since the promise of the Black First Land First (BLF) Movement. Today an ocean of blood divides the ANC from blacks and it is time for blacks to continue the struggle for freedom without the ANC.

Since Marikana, when the black workers were murdered by the ANC for demanding a living wage, South Africa has never been the same again. ANC boldly put the blame on the striking blacks for, in the first place, daring to go against white monopoly capital. The voices of the Marikana workers are the voices of the millions of blacks who until Marikana could blindly believe in the ANC and seek relief from it regarding their unbearable condition.

As the Black First Land First (BLF) movement we maintain that the fight for a living wage, which the Marikana workers died for, is essentially a battle for land and the return of our mineral wealth. Only by the confiscation of our land without compensation in the interests of blacks and by nationalization of the mines while bringing them under direct worker’s and people’s control can we say that the fight for a living wage is over!

500 years of dehumanization by white supremacy, rendering blacks to a life of slavery and cut off from the civilized world of whiteness, tended to strengthen this faith in the ANC via the miracle of 27 April 1994. Marikana, however, has produced thousands of advanced warriors who have consciously broken with this faith in the ANC. The Marikana legacy will continue to educate blacks in whom the instinct of revolution, strengthened in the protest movement and fostered by political organisation, will destroy this faith to its very foundations.

Apart from those being conscientised by Marikana are millions of blacks, who continue to suffer the anti blackness of white supremacy, in whom this faith in the ANC could still survive. They are not ready for revolution and to replace the ANC’s neo liberal regime with a fully responsive state form. These people, for lack of a revolutionary consciousness, could only plead for acceptance within the ANC’s anti black agenda. But the memory and legacy of Marikana compels the destruction of this faith our people have in the ANC as the agent of revolutionary change. To this end, this historical legacy finds its logical consolidation in the ideas of the Black First, Land First movement.

The magnetism of the basic call to revolution around the organizing ideas of Black First Land First has the potential to influence even the most backward strata of the black masses with its Sankofa approach to politics of drawing lessons from the past to move forward. To this end BLF draws lessons from Marikana with the spirit of no return until the land is returned to our people.

History, which blacks were conducting via mainstream politics without a black first land first approach, has confirmed the correctness of the view that that there can be no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory, and that revolutionary theory delinked from the organized mass struggle is to no revolutionary end.

Blacks who who still harbour a shred of faith in the ANC were not ready for black freedom. Since August 16, 2012 the potential for blacks being ready to embark on a path to overthrow ANC rule was very evident but the absence of a revolutionary movement kept this initiative in a stranglehold of neo-liberalism. With the birth of BLF, which puts black first for land first, the Marikana legacy can be driven to its revolutionary conclusion. The ANC by cowardly driving blacks to the wall gave them their first lessons in barricade fighting. The lessons of the Marikana massacre will not be lost.

May the Marikana warriors who died fighting for a living wage be avenged by the fires of revolution through Black First for Land First.

The BLF rejects the establishment of the presidential commission of inquiry and its pseudo truth findings. We regard the function of the Commission of Inquiry as serving to hide the truth, to manage the justified anger of blacks and to interrupt their revolutionary demands. We demand that the ANC government pay reparations to the families for their pain, suffering and loss of income.

We say that the mines must be nationalised and placed under worker control and the dependents of the murdered should get shares in those mines. Lonmin belongs to the murdered workers! Also BLF calls for all workers to get a minimum wage of R12 500. It’s a reasonable demand, and what the Marikana workers died for.

ISSUED BY THE INTERIM COMMITTEE OF THE BLACK FIRST LAND FIRST MOVEMENT
16 AUGUST 2015

In a continent still plagued by abject poverty, civil wars, diseases and corrupt governments, this Africa Day, we must ask whether there is anything really that Africans can celebrate? All the big imperialist nations continue to loot African resources ultimately rendering our people hopeless. It is worth mentioning that currently 14 African countries still transfer most of their profits to French banks which serves as a form of colonial tax. Moreover, our people are subjected to abuse and death as they flee from their countries and some even from their own continent in pursuit of a better life. In these new lands the African is treated with contempt as the most wretched of the earth fueling all forms of anti black violence including Afrophobia. Africa is cursed with leaders who crack the whip on its own people in service of its old colonial masters.

As the September National Imbizo we say: Africa is not free! We have no reason to celebrate! Slavery is rife and as is currently evident unaccounted for in the USA. We stand with all the revolutionary black people in America fighting for liberation. Colonialism is very much alive in Africa! We commit ourselves to realise a truly liberated Africa.

To end the current carnage, wrongly called xenophobia, we need radical Pan Afrikanism and Black Consciousness! Only then will Blacks/Africans understand that the cause of this madness is neo-colonialism and white supremacy, only then shall we understand that democracy (political freedom without ending colonial land theft) is in service of white supremacy, only then shall we understand that all the borders in Africa today were not put up by us but by those who enslaved and colonised us! What is shocking is how deeply we Africans have internalised what white supremacy created to serve white interests. Each time we call a black person a “foreigner” we are speaking the language of the colonizer. Whites in Europe are creating a single Europe with one identity document and one currency. Here in Africa blacks don’t get it! We are still holding on to the colonial enclaves which don’t even belong to us. SA currently does not belong to black people. More than 80% of the land is owned by about 35 000 white families and trusts. The resolution of the colonial question, which is primarily the land question, is key to stabilising life in Africa. We shall not compromise! We call for land first (all of it), destruction of the colonial borders, and the establishment of a United States of Africa under one economy and one political and military arrangement. We can only do that if we defeat the comprador who currently rule Africa in service of the master. The comprador is too corrupt to end white rule. They cut deals with our oppressors all the time. Our people are victims of hunger and ignorance hence they attack their fellow blacks. Hence Steve Biko correctly said that our people suffer from both material and spiritual want. It is the duty of all revolutionaries to understand Pan Africanism and Black Consciousness and to agitate for real revolution, not compromises with land thieves and colonizers! The South Africa government is the epitome of anti black neo colonialism as exemplified by “Operation Fiela” and in this regard SNI condemns its actions.

Until the day Africa is not defined by misery, landlessness and destitution there is nothing that any of us can celebrate! On this day referred to as “Africa Day” SNI directs all revolutionaries to the good counsel of Frantz Fanon in “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in his book “The Wretched of the Earth”: https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/fanon/pitfalls-national.htm